To begin: welcome back. We hope exams didn’t crush your spirits. We hope you scraped whatever grade it is that you’ve arbitrarily decided defines your worth as a human. And we hope that you had a good, relaxing break, during which you emerged at least a little from your end-of-trimester stress-cocoon of fear and No-Doz.
We, too, are refreshed after our month-long break from production, so we’ve shuffled the magazine around a bit to respond to some of the feedback we’ve been hearing from you all. We’ve got three new columns, and we’ve ordered things a little differently. And we’ve traded our news editor, Hannah, in for a younger model, Stella Blake-Kelly. (She’s not a model.)
Seriously, Hannah—you were everything we wanted and needed you to be, and a great asset to the Salient team. Have fun in Japan. We will miss you.
Now.
It is incredibly easy to feel snowed under the ongoing word avalanche that is the Climate Change Debate. Even the term is misleading. ‘Debate’ implies that both sides have supportable arguments, even though 99.9% of all worthwhile scientists agree that we’re not scaremongering, and that this is really happening. “Climate Change Debate” is just what it’s called now—even though it’s not an actual debate.
The world is dying: you can’t even wake up without catching some new little snick of how-to-save-the-world-before-it’s-too-late in your knowledge box. No-one, really, is denying that there is a problem and that it needs to be fixed. We have to do something. Or, you know, else.
But what do we do? Take our canvas bags to the supermarket, ignoring the fact that plastic bags aren’t made to order, meaning that they’ll still exist, clogging up the world without even being used? Do we recycle, even though the recycling process itself produces carbon? Do we take a KeepCup to vicbooks to save the planet, one takeaway mocha at a time?
It’s easy to be shaken into inaction or even apathy by the growing slurry of options and contradictions. So, in this, our Environment issue, we have endeavored to explore as many different reactions and ways of helping the world fix itself as possible. We’ve also printed 2000 fewer copies of the magazine than usual: Salient this week is a limited edition, so either return it to the (newly-rebranded) baskets when you’re done reading, or share it with your flatmates.
That’s our little attempt at saving some trees. What else can we do to slow the rate of world death? Well, here are some answers to that question. *
Hug trees,
@utherlives & @mlle_elle